10 powerful quotes to help you understand the global inequality crisis

10 powerful quotes to help you understand the global inequality crisis

Qazi Danish Nazir is a freelance photographer and a student of media studies from Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. For Oxfam India's Inequality Project, Nazir didn't have to travel far as he came across glaring inequalities in his neighbourhood in South-East Delhi. Paired with powerful quotes on inequality, deprivation, and poverty by philosophers, world leaders, authors, and economists alike, this photo story leaves a deeply powerful impact.

"I do not grudge the millionaire his mansion, but it is my earnest request to them, to do something to bridge the gulf that separates them from the peasants. Let them construct a bridge that would bring them closer to the poor...Let their lives bear some proportion to the lives of the poor around them." Mahatma Gandhi
"Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times — times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry, and wealth accumulation — that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils." Nelson Mandela

“Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.” Thomas Piketty

"The widening gap between rich and poor is not just natural phenomena. It is a sign that much of what we have been doing, especially in terms of models of economic growth, has been wrong." Winnie Byanyima
"Inequality isn’t just about the billionaires, it’s about the fact that the top 10%, and particularly the top 1%, have done disproportionately well. The vast mass of everyone else, including those who you’d consider to be middle-class, although in absolute terms they’re doing much better, in relative terms they’re doing much worse. That’s not how you build a successful country." James Crabtree
"One reason global poverty has been so intractable is that it remains largely out of sight for those who are not living it, safely somebody else’s problem." Kaushik Basu
"We need to ask the moral questions: Do I have a right to be rich? And do I have a right to be content living in a world with so much poverty and inequality? These questions motivate us to view the issue of inequality as central to human living." Amartya Sen
"Inequality causes problems by creating fissures in societies, leaving those at the bottom feeling marginalized or disenfranchised." Nicholas Kristof
"If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion." Noam Chomsky
"Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class." Matthew Arnold

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About Oxfam India's Inequality ProjectOxfam India believes that reducing inequality is fundamental to fair and sustainable development of any nation or society. Hence we have launched a campaign to create awareness about the widening gap between rich and poor, and take action. Every year (during the World Economic Forum at Davos in January) Oxfam releases a global report to track inequality in the world. This year, the report found that in India, the Richest 1% population cornered 73% of the country’s wealth generated in 2017.

For centuries, too many people have lived and died in poverty on the margins of society, suffering discrimination and robbed of opportunity because they are born girls, born poor, or born into the marginalized section of the society. Today these age-old disparities have been further entrenched by an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a small elite

Through the India Inequality Project, Oxfam India aims to create an engaging photo series (inventive, urban & youth-centric) to deepen the understanding and emotional engagement of people with the inequality in India.

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